Key points
- Diplomatic efforts to end the three-year war have stalled
- Last direct meeting between two sides was almost three weeks ago
- Ukrainian commander-in-chief vows to intensify strikes on Russia
ISLAMABAD:At least seven people were killed in a Russian overnight strike on Kyiv and the surrounding region, Ukrainian officials said Monday.
Diplomatic efforts to end the three-year war have stalled, with the last direct meeting between the two sides almost three weeks ago and no follow-up talks scheduled.
“Another massive attack on the capital. Possibly, several waves of enemy drones,” said a statement from Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration.
AFP journalists in Kyiv heard the buzzing of a drone flying over the city centre and explosions, as well as gunfire.
They saw around 10 people sheltering in the basement of a residential building in the centre of the capital waiting for the attack to end, most of them scrolling their phones for news.
“Scale and depth”
The latest strikes came after Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky vowed to intensify strikes on Russia.
“We will not just sit in defence because this brings nothing and eventually leads to the fact that we still retreat, lose people and territories,” he told reporters, including AFP.
Syrsky said Ukraine would continue its strikes on Russian military targets, which he said had proved “effective”.
“Of course we will continue. We will increase the scale and depth,” he said.
Retaliatory strikes
Ukraine has launched retaliatory strikes on Russia throughout the war, targeting energy and military infrastructure sometimes hundreds of kilometres from the front line.
At least four people were killed in an overnight Russian strike on an apartment building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, while a strike on a Ukrainian army training ground later in the day killed three others, officials said.
In wide-ranging remarks, Syrsky conceded that Russia had some advantages in drone warfare, particularly in making fibre-optic drones that are tethered and difficult to jam.
Edge over Ukraine
“Here, unfortunately, they have an advantage in both the number and range of their use,” he said.
He also claimed that Ukraine still held 90 square kilometres (35 square miles) of territory in Russia’s Kursk region, where Kyiv launched an audacious cross-border incursion last August.
“These are our pre-emptive actions in response to a possible enemy offensive,” he said.
Russia said in April that it had gained full control of the Kursk region and denies that Kyiv has a presence there.
Russia occupies around a fifth of Ukraine and claims to have annexed four Ukrainian regions as its own since launching its invasion in 2022 — in addition to Crimea, which it captured in 2014.
Village captured
The Russian army said Sunday that it had captured the village of Petrivske in Ukraine’s northeast Kharkiv region.
Russian forces also sent at least 47 drones and fired three missiles towards Ukraine between late Saturday and early Sunday, the Ukrainian air force said.
RT reported on Sunday that the Russian military struck a military airfield and energy infrastructure in Ukraine in an overnight attack involving missiles and kamikaze drones, the Defence Ministry in Moscow has reported.
In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said that the attack, which was carried out with high-precision air-, land-, and sea-based weapons, as well as explosive-laden unmanned aerial vehicles, targeted the infrastructure of a military airfield and an energy facility that supplied Ukrainian forces in Donbass with fuel.
“The goal of the strike has been accomplished. All designated targets have been hit,” Russian military officials reported, without disclosing the location of the targets.
